Local News

At her inauguration to the Seattle City Council, Kshama Sawant spoke of a divided Seattle — a city of “glittering fortunes” for corporations and the wealthy, but also a city in which the lives of the working poor and unemployed grow increasingly difficult.

Volta, new luxury apartments in Belltown, stands in the shadow of the low-income housing project, Bell Tower. (Photo: Gene Balk/Seattle Times)

Sawant’s speech echoed the “tale of two cities” campaign theme of another newly-elected progressive politician — New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

While the magnitude of income inequality in New York — and especially Manhattan — is notoriously bad, you don’t hear nearly as much about it in Seattle.  So how do we compare?

Washington population in 2013 stands at 6,971,406, according to Census Bureau estimates released Monday.  Since the 2010 census, the state’s population has grown by 3.7 percent — that’s the seventh fastest rate of growth among the 50 states.

High rents in Pioneer Square: Units at the new Nolo Apartments average $2,200 per month (Photo: Nolo Apartments)

How bad is the plight of the Seattle renter?

As reported in The Seattle Times, spiking rents have forced many tenants out of their neighborhoods, or out of the city altogether.

But as dire as the rental situation is here, new data suggest that it could be much worse.   In fact, according to a commonly-used indicator of affordability, renters in Seattle are faring better than those in any other major U.S. city.

Click to enlarge

Move over, San Francisco.

Seattle now has the highest concentration of gay-couple households among America’s large cities.

Recently-released estimates from the Census Bureau show that in 2012, 2.6 percent of Seattle households were gay couples.  That is the highest percentage among the 50 most populous cities in the United States.

San Francisco, which had held the top spot since the Census Bureau began counting same-sex couples in 2000, ranked second with 2.5 percent of all households.

It’s a sharp reversal from previous census estimates.  In 2011, San Francisco had 2.4 percent gay-couple households to Seattle’s 1.7.

We are still No. 2 to San Francisco, however, for the percentage of gay-male households.  But Seattle claimed the top city for the percentage of lesbian couples by a relatively wide margin.  With lesbian couples making up 1.2 percent of households in 2012, Seattle was the only large city to exceed 1 percent.

Click to enlarge

New census data show that racial and ethnic minorities have grown faster than the white population in Washington since 2010.

Non-Hispanic whites declined from 72.7 percent of the state’s total population in 2010 to 71.6 percent in 2012, according to the census.

This may come as unwelcome news to voters in other parts of Washington: King County has even more weight to throw around in statewide elections now.

The county’s share of Washington’s population rose from 28.7 percent in 2010 to 29.1 percent in 2012, according to recently released data from the Census Bureau.

Not only has King County increased its presence in Washington — it’s also crossed a major population threshold: the county hit the two-million mark in 2012.

Microsoft campus in Redmond (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

If Microsoft’s sprawling, 125-building campus in Redmond seems like a city unto itself, that’s because it almost is.

As the cubicle-dwellers arrive each morning, Redmond’s population bulges to more than twice its size.  In fact, newly-released Census data show that Redmond has the greatest spike in daytime population due to commuters, measured by percent increase, among all U.S. places with at least 50,000 residents.

Ref. 74 map: One of these things is not like the other…

Everyone knows by now that same-sex marriage in Washington state was affirmed by popular vote — but the vote was a lot more popular in some parts of the state than others.  Most Puget Sound counties voted in favor of gay marriage, while the rest of the state voted against it.  The geographic divide is abundantly clear on the Washington Secretary of State’s Ref. 74 results map.

And yet, there’s something funny about this map.  Way over on the eastern edge of the state, amid a vast sea of yellow rejection, a lone patch of green approval stands out.  What is that place?

Meet Whitman County.

So why there?  Ref. 74 went down in flames in the rest of Eastern Washington.  What’s different about Whitman County?

The original Seattleite (photo credit: Steven Pavlov via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s your definition of a true Seattleite? When can you officially say that you’re from here? If you asked 10 people you’d probably get 10 different answers.

Are you only a legitimate Seattlite if you grew up inside the city limits? Or is it a matter of having lived here a certain number of years, or a certain percentage of your life? Or is it something more abstract, like an attitude or mentality? How do you earn your stripes?

Personally, I think of myself as a Seattleite. I moved to the city from California in 2002, when The Seattle Times hired me on as a news researcher. So I’ve been here 10 years, and Seattle feels like my home town now. I own a condo in Belltown, I have great friends here, and I feel integrated into the life of the city. When people stop me on the street for directions, I can usually help out. I can pronounce Puyallup without having to think about it first. I’m even pulling espresso shots at home these days. I would call myself a Seattleite without hesitation. But would someone who was born and raised in the city agree with me? Hard to say–I’d ask, but the problem is, I don’t meet a lot of folks who actually did grow up in Seattle.

And the data back me up on this. According to the just-released Census Bureau estimates for 2011, about 62 percent of Seattle residents were not born in Washington state. In other words, three out of every five people living in the city aren’t native Washingtonians, let alone native Seattleites.